The operation of a wireless communication network requires periodic maintenance and testing to ensure that the system is optimally employed. Currently, wireless communication network providers use a variety of tools to plan, design, deploy, test, and maintain their systems.
One problem that has been encountered is that the tools of the various vendors may not be compatible with each other. Additionally, the tools may not be compatible with the information normally collected and maintained by the wireless network provider relating to the performance of the wireless communication system. For example, data may be maintained in a format which is compatible with one vendor's evaluation tool but incompatible with another vendor's evaluation tool. Thus, the data would have to be maintained in two different formats if compatibility with both vendors' evaluation tools is required.
Additionally, there is an issue of data integrity between the applications pre-dominantly used in radio engineering and also between these applications and the rest of the network provider's business. Solutions must also often comply with certain integration requirements, e.g. using Unix server platforms and integration based on open standards.
Although one simplistic approach to data integrity provides a database providing a single source from which applications access data, purchasing packaged software usually precludes this simplistic approach because application vendors need to manage the data relevant for each application. Hence, different applications have different data within an organization.
These problems are further compounded by local or regional copies of applications with the result that across a network provider's national organization, it is extremely time consuming to produce reports, such as site counts, and to track developments for marketing updates. In addition to a data integrity problem, companies suffer reduced efficiency and quality from lacking consistent working practices across the organization.
Moreover, as network providers change or add to their network configurations, it becomes difficult to accurately measure or optimize the performance of existing network configurations. For instance, assessing the performance after any change in network configuration requires new data to be gathered (for example, using drive tests), thereby requiring further investment of time and effort. Once such new data is gathered, network providers still face the additional problem of appropriately integrating the new and existing data in analyzing network performance.
Additionally, when planning changes or evaluating hypothetical changes to network configurations, network providers struggle to obtain accurate predictions of network performance to inform their design and implementation decisions. In particular, conventional approaches provide no way to estimate network conditions for configurations without collected performance data or for configurations with incomplete performance data.
In a related obstacle for network providers, measuring performance in changed and hypothetical/proposed networks is also problematic because of the presence of undetected invalid measurements within existing data. Detecting these suspect or invalid measurements from configuration changes is difficult in view of time, budget, and technical constraints.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the any one of the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.